What do you do if you want a healthy heart? Cut fat, cut cholesterol, and exercise are typical advice, but most people don’t think of reducing sugar as helpful to their coronary health. Why 
not? It may be because in the 1960’s scientists were paid to de-emphasize the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the cause instead. Not paid to conduct research, but paid to conduct research to justify a pre-determined finding.
It can be hard to keep up on the details of rapidly changing science that hit us every day. We thought it might be useful to be reminded that keeping up on the science is only part of the deal… we have to be aware of whether we’re listening to scientists or “scientists”, and take everything we hear with a grain of salt. (Sorry, just couldn’t resist.)
How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame To Fat,
by Anahad O’Connor in the New York Times, Sept 2013
The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper.
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
Even though the influence-peddling revealed in the documents dates back nearly 50 years, more recent reports show that the food industry has continued to influence nutrition science.
Last year, an article in The New York Times revealed that Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, had provided millions of dollars in funding to researchers who sought to play down the link between sugary drinks and obesity. In June, The Associated Press reported that candy makers were funding studies that claimed that children who eat candy tend to weigh less than those who do not.
